Great leaders aren’t always born great. Most often they are shaped by people and experiences that defined their approach to encouraging a group to reach a common goal. For some, encouragement may be autocratic, centered on one leader who makes the decisions and “encourages” others to comply. Others take an approach grounded in servant leadership, providing guidance and support to team members along a path that leads to goal fulfillment.
The Lesson in the Field
A formative leadership experience for me came as a sales representative. My task was to introduce a new product to farmers in the Pacific Northwest. The work required more than a new product introduction. It required helping farmers, their suppliers and their consultants understand a new technology in a way that fit how they made decisions.
I had the fortune of being led by a great manager while also developing an understanding of the variability with which people learn. My manager created an environment that gave me freedom, but with certain levels of accountability. He led through inquiry. Whenever I would suggest a goal, he would respond with “How are you going to do it?” That inevitably led to my developing a plan of action that I took ownership of and implemented to accomplish my goal.
As I set out to introduce this product and implement my plan to reach sales targets, I quickly realized firsthand the variability with which people respond to different stimuli. For example, while my manager was very much a visual learner, many of the farmers I visited were highly kinesthetic. Influencing them required getting them to try something, experience it and see it working firsthand.
This experience was the first real opportunity to understand the variety of ways in which people prefer to experience the world. Each person has unique sensory preferences, a preference for their own personal space versus engagement with others, their ideal way to manifest energy and how they prefer to organize their lives.
If you have had the opportunity to be led by someone who embraces servant leadership, that person recognized these preferences in you and encouraged you to succeed accordingly. You can return the favor for that servant leadership experience by doing the same for the people you lead.
These guideposts can help:
- Create freedom within clear boundaries. People perform at a higher level when they are trusted to take initiative, test ideas and push boundaries responsibly while remaining accountable for outcomes. Give them guardrails, but allow freedom within those parameters.
- Use inquiry to build ownership. My manager asked questions that shifted attention from ambition to execution. “How are you going to do it?” turned a bold goal into a practical plan of which I had ownership.
- Adapt leadership to how people process information. Effective leaders recognize differences in visual, kinesthetic and auditory preferences; introversion and extroversion; and big-picture versus detail-first thinking. They can adjust their leadership dynamic based on the preferences exhibited by the teams they are leading.
- Shape the environment before directing the behavior. My manager’s trust, curiosity and accountability created the conditions for creativity, confidence and field-level learning to emerge.
- Teach indirectly through experience and reflection. The strongest lessons came through questions, observation, action and debriefing rather than instruction alone. Effective leadership is immersive when helping people understand and grow, and less immersive as learnings become action that can be initiated on their own.
- Demonstrate transformational leadership in practical ways. Be mindful of the core elements of the Full Range Leadership Model: individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation and idealized influence.
- Make the work intellectually engaging. For me, this experience was fun because it created challenge, autonomy, experimentation and meaningful feedback — the conditions that kept me fully engaged. It was also successful because it allowed me and my teammates to perform at a very high level — we hit sales growth targets every year.
From Fieldwork to Vujade
This foundational experience demonstrated how leadership and influence are most powerful when they are aligned with how people naturally take in information, make meaning and decide to act. Our farmer customers did not need a lecture; they needed to walk the field, feel the problem, see the result and connect the experience to their own decisions. My manager’s leadership reinforced the same principle: ask the right question, create space for ownership and hold people accountable for the plan.
This insight inspired the creation of Vujade, a leadership collaboration system unique in its approach to operationalizing data to enable scientific comparisons between users, creating higher levels of collaboration and trust. Companies that have used the system to learn more about the people in their organization have found it easier to align with how people learn and prefer to communicate, leading to a better culture and stronger team dynamics.
Keep these guideposts in mind as you work with your own teams, realizing that each person has a unique preferential experience you need to discover to encourage their best performance.
